This week, news surfaced that director Harmony Korine cast a woman for his debauched Spring Breakers on the basis of the fact that she could balance "three or four Coke cans on her ass." It also turns out that star Gucci Mane couldn't stop smoking weed long enough to successfully perform a sex scene with her in the movie. Vulture interviewed Korine, who revealed that the rapper-actor—who plays a rival drug lord to James Franco's Alien—fell asleep during his big sex scene. "As he is getting f*cked, I start to hear snores," said Korine. "He had literally passed out!"

It's an amusing anecdote, but it raises the question of how actors and directors handle those moments on the big screen. Do they really enjoy them? Is it always awkward? Check out the on-screen sex confessions of film and television's finest below.

Lena Dunham

Lena Dunham's sex scenes in HBO's Girls have been forthright and intentionally awkward, raising questions and conversations about female body image issues, relationships, and more. The actress writes, directs, produces, and stars in the series—and by her own admission, she creates the challenging and intimate scenes herself. She told Conan O'Brien: "I will be lying there, kind of being slammed by a naked body, thinking, 'I want out of this bed. I want out of this scene. I want out of this life. Who did this to me?' And I realized, I'm my own boss. I've written it. I'm directing it. I'm the person holding myself in sexual slavery."

Ryan Gosling and Michelle Williams

Blue Valentine, Derek Cianfrance's film about a crumbling relationship contained one of the most realistic sex scenes ever put to film. The MPAA tried to brand the intimate moment between Michelle Williams and Ryan Gosling unsuitable for an R-rating. Gosling called them sexist, reminding them it was a married couple making love, and the NC-17 rating was successfully appealed. That controversy wasn't the only thing that grabbed people's attention. Interviews with the actors revealed an intense, emotional on-screen relationship. Gosling talked to Wmagazine about how he approaches filming a sex scene:

Actors become very professional and proficient about watching out for each other's light and not stepping on each other's lines. All of these things are artificial, and you have to strip that away if you're going to achieve a sense of intimacy. In real life sex is messy...

When I work I'm not nervous. Work is this fabulous free zone. There's no judgment. My problems arrive when I'm not working. At a photo shoot, for instance, I feel like a sham. I feel like they're trying to cover up what's wrong with me. It's probably not true, but just my dirty mind at work.

Michael Fassbender

Michael Fassbender's role as a sex addict in Shame found him vulnerable and often naked in front of the camera. It wasn't his first time with material like that, however, and his experience has made him a sensitive partner. "Sex scenes can be quite awkward. As a guy, the first thing you want to do is make sure you're not taking advantage," he told PopSugar. "You don't want the girl to feel like you're getting a free feel or something. I try to make a fool of myself in one way or another to lighten the mood and then just go for it, because you don't want to be doing take after take." He elaborated on his approach to sex scenes in an interview with Vulture, again stressing the importance of making his partner comfortable:

The most important thing is to say, 'Let's talk about this.'... You have to say, 'What lines do you have that you don't want me to cross? Do you mind if I touch your breasts? Do you not want me to do that? Can I kiss your breasts? Just so you know, I'm not taking advantage here and taking the piss out of this scenario. You let me know what boundaries you're comfortable working within.'... Yeah, you tell jokes on set and try to make things as relaxed as possible, because to be honest, you want to get in there and go for it immediately. Then it's going to be over quicker!

Woody Allen

The on-screen seductions in Woody Allen's films stem from the neurotic charms and quick wits of his characters (most often, himself), but the director did have some things to say about shooting sex scenes in an interview with the New York Times:

If you have no limits, it does become more difficult because there are so many options. Years ago, you had no options, so you had to come up with a few sophisticated ways to show sex. Now you can virtually do what you want to do, and it becomes more of an esthetic decision, and it becomes tougher... Because you can't hide behind the fact that they'll censor you, and you've got to come up with something that is ingenious or esthetically pleasing, and you really have no limits to what you want to show.

Martin Scorsese

In the same interview as Woody Allen, the Last Temptation of Christ director referenced the gritty films of the '70s, noting the boldness and intensity of cinema's sex scenes during the turbulent decade. Scorsese also admitted that he really isn't sure how to approach sex on film anymore:

In the '70s, sex was tougher, stronger, I think. Certain things were very powerful, and I mean movies like Five Easy Pieces or Drive... They were so strange. Now, to a certain extent, with the exception of Crash, which I think is an extraordinary movie, and the very powerful way that Breaking the Waves goes about sexuality—there is a kind of scrubbed-clean quality that is not even sensual anymore. They are fake images and fake bodies. How do you shoot a sex scene? What would you do? I personally don't know how anymore... It really is tougher.

Amanda Seyfried

It's hard not to love Amanda Seyfried's attitude about sex scenes with her male and female co-stars. "Sex scenes are great. A lot of my co-stars have been sexy guys my age, and so, why not? I'm not going to pretend it's not fun," the Les Misérablessaid. She's also been up front about the uncomfortable emotions those moments can inspire. "Any kind of intimacy is strange," the actress noted.

The Academy Award-winning actress has shared sexy screen time with numerous leading men, including husband Brad Pitt. When it was her turn to go behind the camera for In the Land of Blood and Honey, Jolie admitted she approached the sex scene between stars Zana Marjanović and Goran Kostić a bit too "prudish." The experience gave her a new perspective. "You kind of suddenly feel this strange thing of asking people to participate in anything like that because they're not a real couple," she told USA Today. "You find out how strange this is to ask anybody to get naked together and put a camera on them."

Julie Christie

In Don't Look Now, a couple ravaged by the tragic death of their daughter try to pick up the pieces of their lives in Venice. A passionate moment of lovemaking between Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie's characters is erotic but somber, considering the circumstances of their union and the film's finale. The scene caused quite a controversy during its time and rumors persisted for years about the sex being unsimulated. Christie put the kibosh on the chatter, and summed up her feelings on movie sex, in 2011: "Making love on camera is such hard work that there is no time for the libido to take over."

Chloë Sevigny

You'd think the actress that performed unsimulated oral sex on Vincent Gallo in Brown Bunny and did it Mormon-style with Bill Paxton on Big Love would be totally cool with sex on camera. Instead, Chloë Sevigny finds it awkward. "I'm not comfortable doing them—I don't think anyone ever is comfortable doing those kinds of scenes," she told The Playlist last year. In 2010, the star told Huffington Post she had lost interest in performing on-screen sex all together: "I've done many explicit sex scenes, but I'm not that interested in doing any more. I'm more self-aware now and wouldn't be able to be as free, so why even do it?"

Atom Egoyan

Atom Egoyan had a few problems with "thrusting" in 2005. The Canadian filmmaker won the Palme d'Or for Where the Truth Lies, but struggled with the MPAA over several sex scenes (same sex and otherwise), which is ironic considering the movie's portrayal of repressed sexuality. His battle with censorship was featured in the documentary This Film is Not Yet Rated, but the director also detailed his experience in the hilariously titled essay, "The Thrust of the Idea." Egoyan wrote:

I'm convinced that the best way to shoot a sex scene and make it seem real is to use a master shot—an uninterrupted sequence with no cuts. I wanted to see the bodies. The overwhelming challenge was how to show two (and in this case even more) people having sex without depicting the act of thrusting. By its very nature, sex needs thrusting. More specifically, one part of the body must be in some form of friction with another. This isn't a very romantic way of thinking about it, but then again the MPAA isn't a very romantic organization. Their job is to count thrusts, and then decide—depending on the number—who should see the film. Nice work if you can get it.

Jon Hamm

Jon Hamm has shot sex scenes as the tightly buttoned playboy on Mad Men and as Kristen Wiig's jerky boyfriend in Bridesmaids. The experiences weren't as different as they may seem. Hamm described the absurdity of performing for the camera. "It's like running in the rain," he said to Playboy. "There's a certain point when you go, '[Expletive] it, I'm already wet. I'm not going to get any less wet, so I might as well just enjoy how this feels.' I mean, sure, there's awkwardness about being in a weird flesh-colored thong, bouncing on top of an actress."

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Two hundred fifty years of slavery. Ninety years of Jim Crow. Sixty years of separate but equal. Thirty-five years of racist housing policy. Until we reckon with our compounding moral debts, America will never be whole.

And if thy brother, a Hebrew man, or a Hebrew woman, be sold unto thee, and serve thee six years; then in the seventh year thou shalt let him go free from thee. And when thou sendest him out free from thee, thou shalt not let him go away empty: thou shalt furnish him liberally out of thy flock, and out of thy floor, and out of thy winepress: of that wherewith the LORD thy God hath blessed thee thou shalt give unto him. And thou shalt remember that thou wast a bondman in the land of Egypt, and the LORD thy God redeemed thee: therefore I command thee this thing today.

— Deuteronomy 15: 12–15

Besides the crime which consists in violating the law, and varying from the right rule of reason, whereby a man so far becomes degenerate, and declares himself to quit the principles of human nature, and to be a noxious creature, there is commonly injury done to some person or other, and some other man receives damage by his transgression: in which case he who hath received any damage, has, besides the right of punishment common to him with other men, a particular right to seek reparation.

Writing used to be a solitary profession. How did it become so interminably social?

Whether we’re behind the podium or awaiting our turn, numbing our bottoms on the chill of metal foldout chairs or trying to work some life into our terror-stricken tongues, we introverts feel the pain of the public performance. This is because there are requirements to being a writer. Other than being a writer, I mean. Firstly, there’s the need to become part of the writing “community”, which compels every writer who craves self respect and success to attend community events, help to organize them, buzz over them, and—despite blitzed nerves and staggering bowels—present and perform at them. We get through it. We bully ourselves into it. We dose ourselves with beta blockers. We drink. We become our own worst enemies for a night of validation and participation.

Even when a dentist kills an adored lion, and everyone is furious, there’s loftier righteousness to be had.

Now is the point in the story of Cecil the lion—amid non-stop news coverage and passionate social-media advocacy—when people get tired of hearing about Cecil the lion. Even if they hesitate to say it.

But Cecil fatigue is only going to get worse. On Friday morning, Zimbabwe’s environment minister, Oppah Muchinguri, called for the extradition of the man who killed him, the Minnesota dentist Walter Palmer. Muchinguri would like Palmer to be “held accountable for his illegal action”—paying a reported $50,000 to kill Cecil with an arrow after luring him away from protected land. And she’s far from alone in demanding accountability. This week, the Internet has served as a bastion of judgment and vigilante justice—just like usual, except that this was a perfect storm directed at a single person. It might be called an outrage singularity.

Most of the big names in futurism are men. What does that mean for the direction we’re all headed?

In the future, everyone’s going to have a robot assistant. That’s the story, at least. And as part of that long-running narrative, Facebook just launched its virtual assistant. They’re calling it Moneypenny—the secretary from the James Bond Films. Which means the symbol of our march forward, once again, ends up being a nod back. In this case, Moneypenny is a send-up to an age when Bond’s womanizing was a symbol of manliness and many women were, no matter what they wanted to be doing, secretaries.

Why can’t people imagine a future without falling into the sexist past? Why does the road ahead keep leading us back to a place that looks like the Tomorrowland of the 1950s? Well, when it comes to Moneypenny, here’s a relevant datapoint: More than two thirds of Facebook employees are men. That’s a ratio reflected among another key group: futurists.

Forget credit hours—in a quest to cut costs, universities are simply asking students to prove their mastery of a subject.

MANCHESTER, Mich.—Had Daniella Kippnick followed in the footsteps of the hundreds of millions of students who have earned university degrees in the past millennium, she might be slumping in a lecture hall somewhere while a professor droned. But Kippnick has no course lectures. She has no courses to attend at all. No classroom, no college quad, no grades. Her university has no deadlines or tenure-track professors.

Instead, Kippnick makes her way through different subject matters on the way to a bachelor’s in accounting. When she feels she’s mastered a certain subject, she takes a test at home, where a proctor watches her from afar by monitoring her computer and watching her over a video feed. If she proves she’s competent—by getting the equivalent of a B—she passes and moves on to the next subject.

During the multi-country press tour for Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation, not even Jon Stewart has dared ask Tom Cruise about Scientology.

During the media blitz for Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation over the past two weeks, Tom Cruise has seemingly been everywhere. In London, he participated in a live interview at the British Film Institute with the presenter Alex Zane, the movie’s director, Christopher McQuarrie, and a handful of his fellow cast members. In New York, he faced off with Jimmy Fallon in a lip-sync battle on The Tonight Show and attended the Monday night premiere in Times Square. And, on Tuesday afternoon, the actor recorded an appearance on The Daily Show With Jon Stewart, where he discussed his exercise regimen, the importance of a healthy diet, and how he still has all his own hair at 53.

Stewart, who during his career has won two Peabody Awards for public service and the Orwell Award for “distinguished contribution to honesty and clarity in public language,” represented the most challenging interviewer Cruise has faced on the tour, during a challenging year for the actor. In April, HBO broadcast Alex Gibney’s documentary Going Clear, a film based on the book of the same title by Lawrence Wright exploring the Church of Scientology, of which Cruise is a high-profile member. The movie alleges, among other things, that the actor personally profited from slave labor (church members who were paid 40 cents an hour to outfit the star’s airplane hangar and motorcycle), and that his former girlfriend, the actress Nazanin Boniadi, was punished by the Church by being forced to do menial work after telling a friend about her relationship troubles with Cruise. For Cruise “not to address the allegations of abuse,” Gibney said in January, “seems to me palpably irresponsible.” But in The Daily Show interview, as with all of Cruise’s other appearances, Scientology wasn’t mentioned.

The Wall Street Journal’s eyebrow-raising story of how the presidential candidate and her husband accepted cash from UBS without any regard for the appearance of impropriety that it created.

The Swiss bank UBS is one of the biggest, most powerful financial institutions in the world. As secretary of state, Hillary Clinton intervened to help it out with the IRS. And after that, the Swiss bank paid Bill Clinton $1.5 million for speaking gigs. TheWall Street Journal reported all that and more Thursday in an article that highlights huge conflicts of interest that the Clintons have created in the recent past.

The piece begins by detailing how Clinton helped the global bank.

“A few weeks after Hillary Clinton was sworn in as secretary of state in early 2009, she was summoned to Geneva by her Swiss counterpart to discuss an urgent matter. The Internal Revenue Service was suing UBS AG to get the identities of Americans with secret accounts,” the newspaper reports. “If the case proceeded, Switzerland’s largest bank would face an impossible choice: Violate Swiss secrecy laws by handing over the names, or refuse and face criminal charges in U.S. federal court. Within months, Mrs. Clinton announced a tentative legal settlement—an unusual intervention by the top U.S. diplomat. UBS ultimately turned over information on 4,450 accounts, a fraction of the 52,000 sought by the IRS.”

The Islamic State is no mere collection of psychopaths. It is a religious group with carefully considered beliefs, among them that it is a key agent of the coming apocalypse. Here’s what that means for its strategy—and for how to stop it.

What is the Islamic State?

Where did it come from, and what are its intentions? The simplicity of these questions can be deceiving, and few Western leaders seem to know the answers. In December, The New York Times published confidential comments by Major General Michael K. Nagata, the Special Operations commander for the United States in the Middle East, admitting that he had hardly begun figuring out the Islamic State’s appeal. “We have not defeated the idea,” he said. “We do not even understand the idea.” In the past year, President Obama has referred to the Islamic State, variously, as “not Islamic” and as al-Qaeda’s “jayvee team,” statements that reflected confusion about the group, and may have contributed to significant strategic errors.

Some say the so-called sharing economy has gotten away from its central premise—sharing.

This past March, in an up-and-coming neighborhood of Portland, Maine, a group of residents rented a warehouse and opened a tool-lending library. The idea was to give locals access to everyday but expensive garage, kitchen, and landscaping tools—such as chainsaws, lawnmowers, wheelbarrows, a giant cider press, and soap molds—to save unnecessary expense as well as clutter in closets and tool sheds.

The residents had been inspired by similar tool-lending libraries across the country—in Columbus, Ohio; in Seattle, Washington; in Portland, Oregon. The ethos made sense to the Mainers. “We all have day jobs working to make a more sustainable world,” says Hazel Onsrud, one of the Maine Tool Library’s founders, who works in renewable energy. “I do not want to buy all of that stuff.”

An attack on an American-funded military group epitomizes the Obama Administration’s logistical and strategic failures in the war-torn country.

Last week, the U.S. finally received some good news in Syria:.After months of prevarication, Turkey announced that the American military could launch airstrikes against Islamic State positions in Syria from its base in Incirlik. The development signaled that Turkey, a regional power, had at last agreed to join the fight against ISIS.

The announcement provided a dose of optimism in a conflict that has, in the last four years, killed over 200,000 and displaced millions more. Days later, however, the positive momentum screeched to a halt. Earlier this week, fighters from the al-Nusra Front, an Islamist group aligned with al-Qaeda, reportedly captured the commander of Division 30, a Syrian militia that receives U.S. funding and logistical support, in the countryside north of Aleppo. On Friday, the offensive escalated: Al-Nusra fighters attacked Division 30 headquarters, killing five and capturing others. According to Agence France Presse, the purpose of the attack was to obtain sophisticated weapons provided by the Americans.